The Chief Executive Officer of BEIT Farms Mr. Evans Larbi has urged farmers across the African continent to see farming as a serious business. He believes that agriculture plays a pivotal role when it comes to the economic development of this continent.
“The continent has the richest natural resources for agricultural production in the world, so why are we still importing junk foods into our continent” he quizzed.
Mr. Larbi made these remarks in an interview during the Africa Smallholder Farmers Summit 2020 with the theme; “Creating jobs for Africa Women and Youth through smallholder farming”.
Mr. Larbi pointed out that unlocking the country’s agricultural potential will create jobs as well as providing enough food for domestic supply, adding that the task was made more urgent by the vast sums spent on food imports, with Africa spending an annual total of about US$35bn on importation.
However, a strategy change will be necessary in order to achieve this goal. “Agriculture must cease being treated as a development programme; agriculture must henceforth be treated as a business to change the status quo”, he said.
The Chief Executive Officer of Okata Farms Mrs. Mabel Akoto Kwudzo, the 2017 second national best farmer believes that the need has come to comprehensively reposition agriculture as a business among the youth, including its presence in the various levels of education.
Mrs. Kwudzo said that along with creating a youth in agriculture policy which would address some of the long-standing issues that face the youth in agriculture such as access to land and funding for agriculture, marketing and information about the industry, the issue of how agriculture is taught in schools will also need to be addressed.
“There should be a rethink and bigger approach and that start in our education sector,” she said.
The 2020 Best Farmer, Youth in Agriculture for the Upper Manya Krobo District in the Eastern Region underscored the urgency for consistent advocacy on the challenges confronting smallholder farmers and entreated the media to mainstream the sector in the national agenda.
“Agriculture is not a secondary profession neither a fallback profession nor something you do when you don’t have anything else to do. We need to give agriculture a place in our education curriculum and not just to be taught to our students on the basis of primary agriculture,” she bemoaned said.
Story by: Reuben Nana Yaw Jnr.
